A lightweight deep learning architecture for malaria parasite-type classification and life cycle stage detection

Malaria is an endemic in various tropical countries. The gold standard for disease detection is to examine the blood smears of patients by an expert medical professional to detect malaria parasite called Plasmodium. In the rural areas of underdeveloped countries, with limited infrastructure, a scarcity of healthcare professionals, an absence of sufficient computing devices, and a lack of widespread internet access, this task becomes more challenging. A severe case of malaria can be fatal within one week, so the correct detection of the malaria parasite and its life cycle stage is crucial in treating the disease correctly. Though computer vision-based malaria detection has been adequately explored lately, the malaria life cycle stage classification is still a relatively unexplored field. In this paper, we introduce a fast and robust deep learning methodology to not only classify the malaria parasite-type detection but also the life cycle stage identification of the infected cell. The proposed deep learning architecture is more than twenty times lighter than the widely used DenseNet and has less than 0.4 million parameters, making it a good candidate to be used in the mobile applications of such economically challenged states for malaria detection. We have used four different publicly available malaria datasets to test the proposed architecture and gained significantly better results than the current state of the art on malaria parasite-type and malaria life cycle classification.